Tuesday, January 31, 2017

White Nationalism and Trump’s Approach to Russia and the World

Paul
Goble

Staunton, January 31 – Ever since
President Donald Trump elevated self-proclaimed white nationalist Steve Bannon
to the National Security Council at the expense of the director of national
intelligence and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the author of these
lines has been unable to stop thinking about something that happened 26 years
ago this month.

At the end of January 1991, Jerry
Hough of Duke University, Ed Hewett of the Brookings Institution who was soon
to join the National Security Council staff, and I had the honor of briefing
Governor Douglas Wilder of Virginia about developments in the Soviet Union under
Mikhail Gorbachev.

It was a most interesting meeting at
the governor’s mansion in Richmond, but one remark has stuck with me to this
day.Professor Hough said that whatever
Gorbachev did – and this was just after he had ordered the killings in Vilnius
and Riga – the US had to make an alliance with Moscow to “withstand threats
and challenges from Asia and Africa.”

Ed Hewett and I were shocked not
just by the uncouth offensiveness of talking about US foreign policy in such a
racially charged way to America’s only Black governor but also and even more by
the immorality of implying intentionally or not that the US should build an alliance with Moscow
on that basis.

Much has been said and even
documented about the fact that President Trump’s domestic political base
consists largely of working class white males and that his domestic policies
will reflect that reality. But if that white nationalism – which in fact is
just a euphemism for racism – now extends to foreign policy, we are in deeper
trouble than anyone can imagine.

Not only is racism morally wrong and
alien to the best principles of the American project, but it fails to recognize
that the populations of the countries of the world are increasingly
multi-ethnic and multi-racial and that the articulation of a race-based policy
will not only exacerbate international tensions but tear countries apart.

The United States which continues to
struggle with the problems of race will soon cease to be a “white” majority
country, and the Russian Federation, which has an equally dark past in dealing
with minorities, is ever less ethnic Russian, however much Vladimir Putin and
his acolytes try to suggest otherwise.

The United States has many allies
with countries that are “racially” different than our own because we have more
fundamental common interests, and it has fundamental differences with many others,
including the Russian Federation, which in the eyes of some are “racially” more
similar.

Consequently, the supposed defense
of one race against another must not be the basis for foreign policy or for any
alliance with another country that is supposedly “racially” similar.That doesn’t reflect the national interests
of the United States; it reflects the recrudescence of an ancient evil that
must be struggled against.